Call centers are using voice technology to add new understanding to NPS and CSAT scores to improve customer satisfaction.

Why understanding customer relationships are crucial for good customer experience

Give customers a great experience and they’ll buy more, be more loyal, and share their experience with friends. But almost a third of customers (32%) would consider leaving a brand they loved after just one poor experience, according to research by PWC.

That's why understanding customer relationships is crucial for all organizations – and why Net Promoter Score (NPS) and Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) are vital metrics, as they help businesses understand more about customer feelings and perceptions, based on direct and instant feedback.

NPS is a customer loyalty and satisfaction measurement taken from asking customers how likely they are to recommend a product or service to others. CSAT scores are used to quantify the degree to which a customer is happy with a product, service, or experience – usually calculated using a customer satisfaction survey.

A company's ability to understand its customers enables it to create exceptional customer experiences – which have a direct impact on a brand's reputation and revenues. From purchase decision and payment method to delivery and after-sales support, the ability to streamline these touchpoints builds customer loyalty through frictionless experiences.

Customer experience is complex so NPS and CSAT scores on their own are not enough

Communication channels are crucial to influencing NPS. Obtaining a true reflection of customer loyalty can deliver insights for businesses to make significant changes. From organizational restructuring to integrating new tools and offering seamless and joined-up customer experiences.

Contact center managers should constantly ask questions to improve their communication channels and deliver better experiences. Can agents resolve issues immediately? Do we know how our customers are feeling? By asking the right questions, contact centers can make the necessary changes to deliver exceptional customer experiences and ensure brand loyalty.

For a long time, brands have focused on NPS as a key measure of success when it comes to achieving customer loyalty. However, doubts have been cast over the validity of NPS as a success criterion. The Wall Street Journal has observed that CEOs have become obsessed with the metric. Vital business decisions are being made on throwaway inputs from a small percentage of customers. Too much reliance is placed on a single number to measure the success of a brand or product.

NPS gathering boils down to a simplistic, single-question survey. While this encourages more responses, it only answers the 'what?' question – what do people feel? It ignores important questions like 'why do customers feel like this?'. These questions are essential to provide context and impose positive change. Customer experience is complex, so representing its success as a single value is misleading.

Voice technology empowers analytics and improves customer interactions

To improve customer experience, you must first evaluate customer interactions. Data obtained from email, SMS, IVR and customer calls can be combined to provide a rich data set for contact centers. Voice technology gives contact centers access to unfiltered data on the voice of the customer to ascertain why they feel the way they do.

Voice technology transforms customer calls into a valuable text asset. This can be fed into natural language processing (NLP) tools to provide meaningful and actionable insights from voice data. Transforming audio to text significantly reduces the storage cost of call recording. It can also be easily indexed and searched for by keyword or phrase – making calls accessible for analytics purposes.

Analytics provide considerable efficiencies for contact centers – from gaining a 360-degree view of the customer and improving agent performance to enhancing understanding of customer satisfaction and eliminating bad experiences. Analytics help to understand the internal workforce, identify knowledge or training gaps, and roll out data-driven programs and campaigns.

Data taken from unfiltered customer interactions also provides a wealth of information about the customer. This data can be used to improve engagement across all customer touchpoints. Are customers happy during the buying stage but then unhappy with the way the product works? Analytics enable brands to transform bad experiences into good ones to improve overall customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Conclusion: Voice technology adds new understanding to NPS and CSAT scores to improve customer satisfaction

With voice technology, contact centers can use CSAT and NPS data to truly understand customer loyalty and feelings to avoid negative experiences – and deliver products, services and experiences that customers truly care about. Organizations can adapt to grow their consumer base, with more loyal customers than ever before.

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